The production of tires involves the step of placing a green/uncured tire into a curing press and applying heat and pressure for a sufficient amount of time in order to achieve cure. If the tire is under cured in the press, air bubbles or other non-uniformities may develop in the tire and result in a final product with weakened areas and undesired construction. Knowledge of exactly how much time is needed to completely cure a tire may not be able to be achieved because of variations in tire materials and in the tire building process. These variations cause tires to require different amounts of cure time. In order to ensure the tires are properly cured, a safety factor is introduced into the curing stage of the tire. In this regard, extra time is added to the amount of time all tires are cured so that any variation in the tire necessitating a different amount of cure time is taken into account. The downside of adding additional cure time into the process is that this cure time may not be necessary and thus unnecessary time is wasted by keeping the tire at the curing stage. As the curing stage is typically a bottleneck in the tire production process, any wasted time at this stage of manufacture is undesirable. As such, a way of monitoring the tire to determine whether it has achieved cure would help in achieving better through put at the curing stage.
The use of identical or similar reference numerals in different figures denotes identical or similar features.